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Since I was doing my best to avoid caffeine, I asked for some lemonade, while both Chloe and Calvin requested tea. Tom headed off to the kitchen, and the three of us who remained went to settle ourselves in the sitting room.
“Is this seriously their house?” Chloe asked, looking around in awe. She’d seemed sort of tongue-tied when we first arrived, but now that Tom was safely in the kitchen, it appeared she was ready to talk again.
“One of their houses,” I said. “They bought it a few years ago for a vacation place. Usually, they’ll come to town a couple of times a year, but with the baby almost here, they’re planning on staying for a few months.”
My sister’s eyes were still practically owlish. “A house like this, and they barely live in it?”
About all I could do was shrug. “Tom’s work keeps him in California a lot, but they fell in love with the house and wanted to buy it anyway, even though it wasn’t going to be a full-time residence for them.”
This explanation seemed to satisfy Chloe’s curiosity, because she gave a nod, even as she continued to look around, taking in all the antiques and the meticulously preserved Victorian architecture. Although I had to admit it wasn’t really my style — I liked home decor that was much more easygoing and relaxed — the house was still gorgeous, with its shining wood floors, stained-glass windows, and magnificent staircase and elaborately carved balustrade. The furniture had come with the place, giving it the feeling of a residence that had been almost frozen in time.
Well, except for the kitchen, which had been updated recently and was state-of-the-art. However, you couldn’t see the kitchen from where we sat.
Tom came back a moment later with a silver tray laden with our various drinks. After parceling them out to everyone, he sat down at the edge of the prim couch that was a mate to the one where Calvin and I were sitting — Chloe had taken the armchair off to one side — and said, “I’m very sorry for your loss, Chloe.”
She appeared almost taken aback, as though she’d been so absorbed in dealing with her arrest and its aftermath that she’d almost forgotten the reason why she’d been taken into custody in the first place.
“Thank you,” she murmured after an awkward pause. “I guess I’m just trying to get my head wrapped around all this. It doesn’t feel real, you know?”
Tom nodded, although I wasn’t sure whether he really did know. The only time tragedy like this had intruded in his own life was when he’d come here to Globe and had it thrust upon him.
But even when paranormal investigator Brant Thoreau had died on the very staircase located a few yards away from where we currently sat, it wasn’t as though Tom had lost anyone close to him. It had been a tragedy, but once the murderer was discovered and everything had been wrapped up in a neat little bow, he’d been able to get on with his life without too much trouble.
Whereas Chloe had lost someone who’d been part of her world for two years. Yes, the two of them had split up, but still, the impact of Jack Speros’s loss was probably going to remain with her for a very long time.
Especially if I couldn’t figure out who in the world would have done such a terrible thing.
I sent her a sympathetic glance, although she wasn’t sitting close enough that I could reach over and give her hand a reassuring squeeze.
“It’s hard,” I said. “But we’ll get to the bottom of this.”
“We will?” she responded, her voice quavering a bit on the second word.
Poor kid. It had been hard enough for me to handle being suspected of Lucien Dumond’s murder back in the day, when at least I’d been a grown adult managing on my own for years.
How would I have dealt with it if I’d only been barely more than a kid like my little sister?
I honestly couldn’t say. All things considered, I thought she was holding it together pretty well.
“Absolutely,” I said, my tone firm. Next to me, Calvin shifted in his seat just the tiniest bit, but I knew he wouldn’t speak up, not when it was someone related to me by blood who was now in trouble. Otherwise, he might have gently done his best to remind me that our first child was due to appear in less than two weeks and that maybe this was the sort of occasion where I should hang back and let the experts handle things. “We’ll wait for your parents to get here and talk everything over, but after that, I’ll try to gather whatever evidence I can.”
“But there isn’t any evidence,” Chloe said, her voice and expression both glum. “Or at least, nothing except that garrote thing that Chief Lewis found in my trunk. I still have no idea how it got there.”
“Well, that’s something we can work on together,” I told her, doing my best to sound confident and unruffled, even though I was anything but. “Just because it might look incriminating on the surface doesn’t mean there might not be a perfectly logical explanation for why that garrote ended up there.”
“Cars are easier to break into than a lot of people think,” Calvin put in, speaking for the first time. “Especially car trunks. It makes sense to me that someone got into yours specifically to put that incriminating evidence there. Did Henry find any fingerprints on the garrote’s handles?”
She shook her head. “No. Of course, he said I could have just been wearing gloves, but I think that’s part of the reason why the judge gave me bail — there’s circumstantial evidence and not a whole lot more.”
That new bit of information sounded encouraging. Lacking any real evidence, I doubted the county’s case against Chloe would hold up. Still, much better to get her exonerated long before any of this went to court.
“Did your parents say anything to you about an attorney?” Calvin asked then, and she shook her head.
“Not exactly. I mean, they said they’d need to hire someone local but they’d wait to talk to you since you’d have a much better idea of who to approach.”
Yes, choosing a defense attorney for your daughter wasn’t exactly the sort of thing you wanted to do on the fly with a simple Google search.
“It’s not a problem,” I told her. “We’ll be able to find someone for you…if it even comes to that.”
